It’s three in the afternoon and I am in the midst of a highly enthusiastic group of Grade 5 students. They are exploring “How the World Works”; their focus: “technology down the ages”. The first idea they come up with is a Time Machine – time travel, as a dramatic device, will give them the freedom to “explore” the past and the future without a very elaborate plotline.

The next step is to create a few characters: some time travellers and others playing multiple roles – natives of a certain age. In a jiffy, we have four young people taking off in the time machine. They land in the Stone Age. Here four students take over as the “native” people. “What are you all doing?” I ask them. Immediately, two of them beginning to make stone tools; two others start making a fire – all through mime. “What sort of communication took place between them?” I ask again. Instantly, they are native speakers of gibberish!

The play goes on, partly improvised by them, with ideas suggested by their mentor – and incredibly, all the while, all I (the Drama Facilitator) am doing is to help give a shape to the drama.

The technique is very simple – we place children WITHIN the context, and ask a few leading questions. The theory behind this is that human beings in any day or age have some things in common – they FEEL, they THINK, they IMAGINE, they CREATE and they OFTEN makes mistakes from which they learn.

Theatre creates the safe space in which someone can step out of his/her own shoes and into someone else’s. There is nothing right and there is also nothing wrong. For kinaesthetic learners, theatre is the greatest boon of all – when they can get out from BEHIND the desks and out of their chairs: they can BECOME rivers, oceans, planets, starts, atoms, electrons… the possibilities are endless. And finally, the connection all children make with concepts they have explored through theatre is completely unparalleled.